Weekly output: FOIAing for facial-recognition software

Posted on January 5, 2020 by robpegoraro

LAS VEGAS–I’m only a few hours into this year’s CES, and I’ve already had to bag one appointment. Not because I was running late, but because I tried to stay on schedule by going direct from the airport. But while the two individual vendor events I’m going to are okay with that, the CES Unveiled reception was not. Whoops.

I If you’d like to know more about my agenda for this week in Vegas, I outlined all that for Patreon subscribers earlier today.

1/4/2020: To learn how police use facial recognition, we must ask the right questions, Fast Company

A presentation a few weeks ago at the Cato Surveillance Conference in D.C. got me interested in this crowdsourcing experiment in surfacing information (do we call that “crowdsurfacing”) about police uses of facial-recognition technology by using state freedom-of-information laws. Then it took me a few more frazzled pre-holiday weeks to quiz one of the people who worked on this project, plus another week to write the thing.

Weekly output: Google hearings (x2), Microsoft wants facial-recognition rules, Google Maps and Lime scooters, U2F security keys, U.S. newspapers vs. the GDPR

Posted on December 16, 2018 by robpegoraro

My calendar for the coming week looks strange: There isn’t a single work appointment on it. I plan to celebrate that by not shaving tomorrow.

12/10/2018: Congress will grill Google’s CEO this week — here’s what to expect, Yahoo Finance

The House Judiciary Committee–in particular, certain of its Republican members–obliged me by living up so completely to this preview of Google chief executive Sundar Pichai’s Tuesday appearance there.

12/10/2018: Microsoft is asking the government to regulate the company’s facial recognition tech, Yahoo Finance

Microsoft president Brad Smith came to the Brookings Institution last week to make an unusual plea: Please regulate us before we get dragged into a race to the bottom with ethically-unbounded vendors of facial-recognition technology.

12/13/2018: Google Maps will now help you find Lime scooters, Yahoo Finance

I got an advance on this news from one of Lime’s publicists; by itself, this new feature isn’t a huge development, but covering it allowed me to discuss broader failings in both Google and Apple’s navigation software.

12/13/2018: On privacy, Google CEO’s congressional hearing comes up short, The Parallax

I wrote about several security and privacy questions that should have been asked during Pichai’s grilling but never came up. The single worst omission: Not a single representative even mentioned the name of a non-Google search engine.

12/14/2018: Primer: How to lock your online accounts with a security key, The Parallax

I’ve had the idea of an explainer about “U2F” security keys on my to-do list for a while. In the time it took for me to sell the piece, Microsoft and Apple finally began moving to support this particularly secure two-step verification option.

12/16/2018: Post-Dispatch, Tribune haven’t caught up with EU rules, Gateway Journalism Review

My former Washington Post colleague Jackie Spinner wrote about how the sites of some U.S. newspapers continue to block European readers instead of complying with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. She gave me a chance to critique this self-defeating practice–I’d earlier griped about it in a Facebook comments thread with her–and I was happy to give her few quotes.

Weekly output: facial recognition, Washington Apple Pi

Posted on July 29, 2018 by robpegoraro

This was a challenging week, since our daughter’s camp schedule had her at home during most of the day. If I had a dollar for every time I was asked to help find a Lego piece… I’d buy our kid more Legos, because they are awesome.

7/27/2018: Microsoft argues facial-recognition tech could violate your rights, Yahoo Finance

My inspiration for writing this was Microsoft president Brad Smith calling for government regulation of this technology; having the ACLU report that Amazon’s Rekognition facial-recognition service falsely identified 28 members of Congress as criminal suspects motivated me to finish and file the post.

7/28/2018: Rob Pegoraro, ronin technology columnist, Washington Apple Pi

I spoke at the monthly meeting of this Mac/iOS user group about changing notions of security–or, to phrase things less politely, how foolish and gullible we’ve been in prior years. (Seriously, the defaults most people operated on in 1995 and 2000 look horrifyingly stupid now.) I also called out such lingering obstacles in infosec as Apple’s unwillingness to support “U2F” two-step verification via encrypted USB keys and Microsoft’s bizarre stance that full-disk encryption is something only business users need. In the bargain, I donated my now-deceased MacBook Air to the Pi’s MacRecycleClinic and gave away a bag of trade-show swag, including a couple of U2F keys.

Update, 7/31/2018: I had an embed of the Pi’s YouTube clip of my talk, but I didn’t know that stream had playback disabled on other sites until a reader called that out in a comment. (Thanks, jeffgroves!) So I’ve replaced that with a link to the clip.

Rob Pegoraro

Occasional shop talk about journalism, technology and a few other things

Tag Archives: facial recognition

Weekly output: FOIAing for facial-recognition software

Weekly output: facial recognition, Washington Apple Pi